Category: Thoughts

About suffering they were never wrong

We’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis. A manifestly unqualifed, poorly-vetted, corrupt justice is about to be installed on the Supreme Court. The foxes are trying to hedge their bets from inside the henhouse.

Even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts, 35% of Republican voters cast ballots for a man credited with triggering a yearslong wave of anti-gay violence in Uganda. In a shocking echo of Hungarian fascism, Texas has ordered school districts to stop funding education for migrant children. Government cruelty to immigrant citizens is now extending to Vietnamese-Americans. The government officials marketing this sort of cruelty have a longstanding process of making money from it even when the policy is overturned.

Anyhow, in a corner, some untidy spot, where the dogs go on with their doggy life… the economy has somewhere to get to and sails calmly on. We still have to work.

Good economic news!
A while ago Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for saying “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.” The fact-checkers said, well, actually “everyone” is an exaggeration, and the number of multiple-job-holders isn’t that significant. Her correct and important point – that the unemployment numbers don’t reflect the very serious problems of wage stagnation and overall misery – was (of course) ignored in a rush to pile on to her slight inaccuracy. (For some reason this level of scrutiny isn’t applied to certain male officials with white or orange skin).

I’m one of the people the fact-checkers say is statistically insignificant: When I took my third job, I rose to about 30 hours a week, so the state cut off my unemployment benefits and now counts me as one of the gainfully employed. I’m good economic news! I’m also getting a great lesson in precarity: I don’t know from week to week how much I will bring home, much less my annual earnings, although I’m pretty certain they’ll be substantially lower than last year. If my household were actually on the brink, as so many American households are, it would be really, really bad.

This week, I got another job. I’m not yet at the level of Kevin Gates, boasting “GET IT GET FLY I GOT SIX JOBS I DON’T GET TIRED” but for those of you keeping track at home, I’ve got four jobs now: Essay coach, two consulting gigs, and now poll worker.
kevin-gates
Like all the others, being a poll worker is seasonal, temporary, and contingent. In this case, it’s roughly minimum wage, and there are just a handful of available workdays each year: Primary election, early voting, and general election. The primary this past Tuesday was my first day on the job. It was hot and the chairs were uncomfortable and I have a newfound distaste for people who write in no-hope candidates as a protest, because I had to count them at the end of the night, but it was mostly a great experience and I made about $165. Good economic news!

This month one of my other jobs is ending. Sort of.

See, the organization has a policy to prevent exploitative perma-temp arrangements, so I can’t be a temp anymore. Instead, I’ll be a consultant. Of course, they also have policies to prevent exploitative miscategorization of employees as consultants. A consultant has multiple customers and advertises for multiple customers, so I needed to update my LinkedIn to reflect that. Merely looking for a full-time job and doing some freelance work doesn’t make me overtly consultative enough. Moreover, a consultant doesn’t have a dedicated desk and doesn’t use dedicated company resources. So I have to take my name and the photo of my wife out of the shared cubicle (five people, four desks). Consulting!

Mistakes were made on all sides
A plainclothes cop left his unmarked vehicle running while picking up a to-go order at a pizzeria. Two teens jumped in for a joyride and were unsurprisingly caught. And beaten. And cuffed. And then beaten some more. Also attacked by dogs.

And then the recording of the interrogation was released:

Welcome to White Town motherfuckers…. I’m not hampered by the fucking truth ’cause I don’t give a fuck! People like you belong in jail. I’ll charge you with whatever — I’ll stick a fucking kilo of coke in your pocket and put you away for 15 years.

The officer in question was given a 60-day paid suspension.

(Note that the “Rin Tin Tin Myth” makes police dogs seem noble and friendly. Arrests with dogs are brutal.)

(Must be nice to have a union. I would be fired immediately from any of my several jobs for doing any of the things that cop did, starting with leaving a company vehicle unattended with the keys in the ignition).

Cultivating joy
Don’t look behind you, there’s a bird trying to keep up. (I can’t remember if I posted this before but it’s still funny to me).
A short story read by a former student of mine. Another story of hers will be in The Best American Short Stories of 2018, edited by Roxane Gay.
Some birds teach each other how to do stuff.

Trouble With a Capital T

We got trouble with a capital T that… yeah. The Washington Post reports that “the Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.”

See, once it turned out that Obama had a birth certificate, nobody could trust birth certificates anymore. Because obviously Obama wasn’t American. You know, you have to be American to be a citizen. I can’t exactly define what that means, but I know it when I see it.

I mean, you better not have a Bank of America bank account if you’re not One Of Us.

And yes, I am specifically referring to the horrifically exploitative pre-code film Freaks:

freaks-movie-still
Like looking in a mirror
In Hungary, there’s a tax on doing anything nice for immigrants.

There’s a new sexism scandal at a Tokyo medical school.

Chinese parents are furious as their expensive school district admits kids from poor regions. Solution: A “poor door” so the children of migrants don’t wind up in the classrooms of property-owners.

Big ideas
Francis Fukuyama tries to explain why history stubbornly refuses to end. His original prediction has become, at this point, a punchline more than an idea.

For example, StrongTowns has a great article this week on what they’re calling the “irrelevance of thingies,” by which they mean that the Internet of Things type hype is largely just hype. They contend that cities actually matter even more than they used to:

It’s been more than two decades since Frances Cairncross published his book The Death of Distance that prophesied that the advance of computing and communication technologies would eliminate the importance of “being there” and erase the need to live in expensive, congested cities. (It goes down, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Kevin Hassett’s Dow 36,000 as one of the demonstrably least accurate book titles of that decade.)

Cultivating joy
Cat is terrible dinner guest.
Cat is rude to marine life.
Swarm of very wrinkly little puppies.

Individual 1 For President

Someone must have set ’em up
Now they’ll be workin in the cold grey rock
Now they’ll be workin in the hot mill steam
Now they’ll be working in the concrete
In the sirens and the silences now
All the great set-up hearts
All at once start to beat…

individual-1-bumper-sticker
Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres…

Legacy
Adam Serwer notes the very American precedents for the Trump kleptocracy… and also reports that these two paragraphs have inspired a great deal of hate mail:

Many commentators have described that kind of authoritarianism as foreign to the United States. But it isn’t. It has its inspiration and precursor in the racial kleptocracy of the Jim Crow South, in which states were essentially criminal enterprises that existed to expropriate black wealth, exploit black labor, disenfranchise black voters, and shield acts of racist terrorism and violence from prosecution.
Remnants of this society are still with us, from mass incarceration, to discrimination against black jurors, to stand-your-ground laws. But alongside it, America retains a system in which the wealthy remain largely immune to [punishment for] financial crimes. Weak laws and regulations make the prosecution of financial crimes difficult, and prosecutors are often loath to pursue individuals who might be able to fill their campaign coffers come election time. Whether the president is Barack Obama or Donald Trump, the rich can afford a different kind of justice than everyone else.

Big ideas
What is the fate of capitalism? Well, that depends on what you mean by “capitalism” doesn’t it?

Seattle fears becoming San Francisco, split between wealth and shitting in the streets.

Article suggestions from our friend Kevin: Slavery inspired Taylorism, the root of modern management theory; Do robots already rule the world?

Cultivating joy
Big cats carrying big kittens
Cats are liquid. Pro and con.

Pop Psychology

I’m taking business courses right now, which sometimes seems to mean memorizing a lot of pop-psychology mnemonics for different personality and management models and theories. One of the models of behavior we have learned is called “Influence Without Authority” and it begins with treating your opponents as potential allies. This seems hopelessly naive sometimes but I’ve tried to apply it to my daily life anyway.

For example, the Somerville Ward 3 Democrats mailing list lit up this week about a project to turn a former function hall into apartments. Neighbors were concerned about parking and about the addition of rental units, because they felt that renters don’t stick around and create a stable community. I managed to gently guide the discussion toward the far less controversial topics of immigration policy and classism by pointing out that if our town wants to be welcoming to immigrants and people with modest means, it need to begin by making it possible for them to find a moderately priced apartment. It kind of worked, in that it led to a non-furious internet disagreement. Which, I guess, is a small miracle in its own way.

Links
Injustice: That prison is literally made of poison. Obviously they told nearby citizens about the danger of drinking local water, but not the prisoners.

Note also that in a sad echo of the three-fifths compromise, prisoners are counted in the census as residents of their prisons, but not permitted to vote, distorting representation, voting power, and funding distributions.

Sarcasm: A modest proposal on what else we could replace with Amazon services.

Policy: A brief history of public housing in Vienna. In stark contrast with American public housing, it doesn’t suck.

Iatrogenic medicine: Sasha Frere-Jones on the harms of benzodiazepenes.

Win/Fail via Twitter
Yak fail.
Dog win.
Dog fail.
Chart fail.

If you think David Brooks is right, check again

David Brooks has a pretty decent column, for once, in the Times today. He discusses Trump’s strange lack of “theory of mind” and notes that the world is over-analyzing his work.

But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.

…
We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

This seems pretty insightful! And it would seem more insightful if I had not read a nearly identical piece from David Roberts, writing in Vox, four days ago:

On Twitter I talked about “theory of mind,” a basic capacity humans develop around the age of 2 or 3 to recognize that other people are independent agents, distinct minds, with their own beliefs, desires, fears, etc. We learn to “read” behaviors as evidence of those internal states.

…
Much of the dialogue around him, the journalism and analysis, even the statements of his own surrogates, amounts to a desperate attempt to construct a Theory of Trump, to explain what he does and says through some story about his long-term goals and beliefs.

…
But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?

Today In History

Today’s newsletter is about history and the future. I didn’t have room for this digression but it sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole anyway:

On May 9, 1726, several men were hanged at Tyburn following their arrest during a raid on Mother Clap's Molly House

The term “molly house” referred to a gathering place for gay men, usually a tavern, coffee shop, and/or brothel. Sodomy had been punishable by death since the Buggery Act of 1533 (when it first came under civil, rather than ecclesiastical, law) and remained a crime until 1967. Documents surrounding trials for these offenses would later become key objects of historical study. Gay men were more likely than lesbians to be prosecuted, and their history is therefore better documented.